Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Pets in the Blitz

War Horse, by way of book and play and film, has brought the role of horses in war into the public consciousness. Even before it, there was the erection of an Animals in War Memorial on Park Lane, paid for by an impressive list of aristocrats under the leadership of commoner Jilly Cooper. But what of pets, or what Professor Hilda Kean prefers to call ‘companion animals’? Not long ago, in Paddington, I was walking my own dog when accosted by an incredibly old man who said that he had lost his dog during the war. ‘Oh,’ said I, with my eyebrows raised. ‘Yes, we lived on the Wirral peninsula,

James Mcnamara

Flee or die

Every nation has the right to control its borders, but we in the West are getting a bit too comfortable dehumanising other humans for failing to fill out forms in triplicate before fleeing the carpet-bombing of their cities. In recent months, Theresa May has rejected Calais’s child refugees; Donald Trump has seemingly tried (unsuccessfully, twice) to ban Muslims; and Australia has gone full ‘Dickensian judge’ and chucked its refugees on a prison island. So at a time when expressing the hope that refugee kids don’t starve to death in camps marks one out as a ‘luvvie snowflake’, it’s good to have a writer grab us by the lapels and shout:

Michael Bywater

Deeply mysterious

The human urge for personal hygiene has had many improbable side-effects, and I can confidently assert that through the ages, sponge-divers have punched consistently above their weight. Bronze-age tools, 10th-century Islamic glassware, a Byzantine ship whose plunge to the bottom was cushioned by the fourth-century Roman wreck it alighted upon, anchors, amphorae, sculpture: if it’s down there, they’ll bring it up. And so, around Easter 1900, there they were, waiting out the bad weather in the shelter of Potamós on Antikythera, a small island northwest of Crete. They decided to use their time profitably, took an exploratory plunge, and one of them, Ilias Lykopantis, discovered a life-size bronze arm, subsequently

William Dalrymple

Ripping yarns

In the 1860s, when British visitors first began to explore the high altitude pleasures of Kashmir, it was not just the beauties of the valley and the cool, pellucid waters of the Dal Lake which took their breath away. Living there was a legendary relic of an earlier age, who quickly became an object of pilgrimage for the curious sahibs puffing away at their cheroots on the sundecks of the houseboats. Alexander Gardner was, in the words of his latest biographer, John Keay, ‘a beturbaned colonel of uncertain nationality with a chequered past and a hole in the throat’. This throat wound was a dramatic souvenir of his days as

Nicholas Lezard

Signs and spellsnich

On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes, the great French intellectual, was run over by a laundry van in Paris. He died from his injuries a month later. This book — Laurent Binet’s second novel — proposes that it was not an accident; that Barthes had just come from lunch with the Socialist candidate for the forthcoming French presidential elections, François Mitterrand, and that he was in possession of an extremely important document, one which gave detailed instructions on the seventh function of language. Of course, you all know that, as defined by Roman Jakobson, there are only six functions of language (among them the Performative — ‘I now pronounce you

Philip Hensher

Love under wraps

It’s an important subject: the existence of a permanent and significant minority within London’s life. Gay men and lesbians have always been there, leaving — or taking care not to leave — traces of their existence. But for the historian, a difficulty arises: often the only evidence lies in their occasional brushes with the law. We often know nothing about how gays lived in each other’s company. Letters were destroyed; diaries were scrupulously kept free of anything that could lead to a conviction; and lives were reconstructed around the fictions of a bachelor chambers, or two ladies sharing. How many devoted footmen to bachelor barristers were actually lovers of decades?

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Taking Hamlet around the world

This week’s Books Podcast turns to perhaps the greatest work of the greatest writer in English history. Yup: it’s Hamlet time. Specifically, I’m talking to the former artistic director of the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, about his scheme to perform Hamlet in every country on the face of the earth – a two-year scheme whose rackety history and ultimate success he recounts in his fascinating new book Hamlet: Globe to Globe. A touring company taking Hamlet from Botswana to North Korea and all points in between? It sounds like the sort of thing you’d come up with after a few too many beers. Well, now that you mention it… You can

Thursday

Keiron Pim

In a dark forest

In his mid-forties Will Ashon realised he was adrift and confused, confronted by the situation Dante described in the Divine Comedy: ‘In the middle of our life’s path/ I found myself in a dark forest.’ Ashon’s dark forest was metaphorical to begin with — conscious of ageing, dis-satisfied with his career in the music industry, wondering where to turn — but it became literal as he sought answers by exploring Epping Forest, the vast ‘shadow of London’ near his home in Walthamstow. Strange Labyrinth takes its title from a beguiling sonnet by the Jacobean author Lady Mary Wroth, who lived at nearby Loughton Hall, and charts Ashon’s twisting, sometimes perplexing

Milos Stankovic

When will we ever learn?

In 2012, sugar became more dangerous than gunpowder. According to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, of the 56 million people who died that year, 620,000 did so by the hand of their fellow humans: 120,000 in war and 500,000 from crime. By contrast, 1.5 million died from diabetes. Harari’s wry observation adds weight to Steven Pinker’s assertion in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that humans are on a trajectory towards peace and non-violence. But wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan, across the Sahel and Yemen; Russian and Chinese irredentism; nuclear threats from North Korea; Trump’s belligerency, not to mention the asymmetry of terrorism, render urgently relevant the continued

Nigel Jones

Burning issues | 4 May 2017

Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is a memorial raised by the Protestant Alliance in 1870 commemorating the men and women who died agonisingly nearby, roasted alive for refusing to abjure their new-found reformed religion. Nimble intellectual footwork was needed across the 16th century of Tudor rule to keep the fires of Smithfield at bay. In the reign of Henry VIII, orthodox Catholicism was temporarily set aside to allow the monarch a divorce, in order to get his thigh across the reform-minded Anne Boleyn. Henry himself, however, remained resistant to the new faith. Not so his son

Rose George

Cinderella in China

She was a foundling in her own family, shunted to adoptive parents for two years, then to the edge of China, to a fishing village on the East China Sea, and to a furious, alcoholic grandfather and a grandmother sold at 12 into marriage for some pottage, and never given a name. Is that colourful enough for you? But there is more: the life story of the young Chinese filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo makes Cinderella’s seem bland. The hovel she lived in until she was seven was on Anti-Pirates Passage. Her grand-father, a failed and bitter fisherman, lost his livelihood in the 1970s, when the Chinese state collectivised fishing

Jude Cook

Appointment with death

It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles the capacious, Booker long-listed Self-Help. Like that book, this is fiction with heft and moral nuance; a novel that gets its hands dirty in the soiled laundry basket of family secrets and resentments. As such, it’s his most universal, moving and resonant work to date. Appropriately for a book whose title is taken from Gloucester’s impassioned command to Edgar in King Lear, the story begins at Dover, with the narrator Lou and his 71-year-old academic father Larry (‘one of the prophets of the new literary theory’), about to embark on

Ariane Bankes

A husband to die for

What will we do when there are no longer caches of letters to piece together and decipher; only vague memories of myriad emails? We will be like butterfly hunters flailing around with our nets, hoping to catch some rare specimen with glittering wings among the detritus of daily exchanges. The letters of Ida Nettleship, first wife of the arch-bohemian Augustus John, are a case in point: gathered together here from diverse sources by her granddaughter Rebecca John and expertly introduced by John’s biographer Michael Holroyd, they constitute a rare epistolary treasure trove. Spanning some 15 years, from Ida’s late teens to her early death from puerperal fever at 30, following

Ben Markovits

Climb trees and grow a beard

A few years after Walt Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass (it didn’t do well), he wrote a column on ‘Manly Health and Training’ for the New York Atlas. His pieces were published under a pseudonym, Mose Velsor, and have only recently been connected to Whitman by a graduate student at the University of Houston, who discovered them on microfilm. (Unless this whole thing is a joke — it’s a little hard to tell.) Boxtree has cherrypicked from over 47,000 words of manly advice to produce a cod-retro book along the lines of the Ladybird Book of the Hangover or the Ladybird Book of the Midlife

Jane Ridley

Suspension of disbelief

The history of modern medicine is a roll call of brilliant minds making breakthrough discoveries. We rarely hear about the losers, but Wendy Moore has chosen to write the extraordinary story of a massive medical fiasco: the craze for mesmerism which gripped Victorian London in 1838. The practice of using the ancient technique of hypnosis for medical purposes takes its name from the 18th-century German physician Franz Mesmer. The mesmerist of Moore’s story was a society doctor called John Elliotson, a man who has been almost forgotten today. Elliotson was a self-made physician who rose quickly to the top of his profession. Clever, tough and ambitious, by the age of

Claire Lowdon

The fearful forties

In an early chapter of All Grown Up, the narrator Andrea says to her therapist: ‘Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I’m other things, too.’ ‘Tell me who you are, then,’ says the therapist. And so Andrea tells her that she’s a woman, a New Yorker, that she works in advertising as a designer, that she’s a daughter, a sister and an aunt. In her head, she adds: ‘I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.’ We meet Andrea when she’s 39, asking herself,

Boyd Tonkin

On the trail of a lost masterpiece

On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a handful of them were Jews in flight from the Third Reich. After a dismal farrago of diplomatic obstruction, bare-faced corruption among local officials and the incitement by Nazi propaganda of anti-Semitic prejudice ‘even’ (as Leonardo Padura sorrowfully puts it) ‘among the open and happy Cubans’, only a score of refugees could disembark. The US refused entry to the rest. Their ship of despair sailed back to Europe. Around this shaming episode, the genial gadfly of Cuban literature has built a digressive, eccentric but deeply absorbing novel: part-detective story, part-historical enquiry,

Tuesday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: rude limericks by well-known writers

Leafing through Vern L. Bullough’s Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia, I discovered that Tennyson wrote rude limericks as an antidote to the rigours of more serious writing, and it inspired me to challenge you to compose ribald limericks in the style of a well-known writer. Tennyson obviously isn’t alone. William Baring-Gould, who wrote a history of the genre, noted that when a limerick appears, sex is not far behind. Or, to put it another way: The limerick’s an art form complex Whose contents run chiefly to sex; It’s famous for virgins And masculine urgins And vulgar, erotic effects The challenge went down a storm, pulling in a record-breaking entry. The best

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: How freakin’ zeitgeist are you?

In this week’s Books Podcast, I meet the poet Murray Lachlan Young. In the 1990s, Murray became notorious: the first and only poet in history to get a million-pound contract with a record label. Naturally, those living in the standard-issue garrets developed some envy issues. As he promotes his collected work, How Freakin’ Zeitgeist Are You?, Murray talks in detail for the first time about the wild and eventually traumatising ride that took him from obscurity, via the main stage on Glastonbury, to obscurity again — before he picked up the pieces and returned to the stage. He also shares a somewhat disrespectful poem about a former editor of this

Dominic Green Dominic Green

America’s other civil war

‘What makes the Red Man red?’ the Lost Boys asked in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). According to Sammy Cahn’s lyric, it was embarrassment: ‘The very first Injun prince/ He kissed a maid and start to blush.’ Redness is everywhere in The Earth is Weeping — in the anger of the Indians, harried and starved into fatal resistance; in the shame of the whites, with their fork-tongued treaties and heavy weapons; and in the blood, Indian and white, that flows on almost every page of Peter Cozzens’s sweeping, expert and appalling account of the murder of America’s Indians. Every nation has its founding sin. America, the land of plenty, has two.